Andrew Coyne: Harper’s Tories may have perfected dumb, dishonest, attack-dog politics, but they didn’t invent it

The current issue of The New Yorker contains an absorbing piece by Jill Lepore on Campaigns Inc., the “first political consulting firm in the history of the world.” Established in 1933 by a pair of former journalists, the firm went on to win 70 of 75 elections for its clients over the next two decades, in the process writing the rules for every campaign that was to follow.

As Lepore summarizes them, they include: “Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues… Pretend that you are the Voice of the People… Attack, attack, attack… Never explain… Say the same thing over and over again… Simplify, simplify, simplify…” And, a personal favourite: “You can put on a fight, or you can put on a show.”

So no, the Harper Conservatives did not invent dumb, dishonest, attack-dog politics — though they may have perfected it. The return of Parliament has certainly reminded us yet again how eye-bleedingly stupid our politics is generally, and of the Tories’ own particular contributions to the lexicon of mindlessly repeated mistruths. But we should not think that any of this is new. More overt, certainly. Worse, perhaps. But not new.

Forget Campaigns Inc. Forget Machiavelli, for that matter. Read, you budding political strategists, the Commentariolum Petitionis, Quintus Tullius Cicero’s letter to his more famous older brother Marcus, candidate for the office of consul in the hotly contested election of 64 BC. Its advice (lately published in a new translation by Philip Freeman) would be familiar to any present-day politician: promise whatever you have to — you can always renege later (“it is better to have a few people in the Forum disappointed when you let them down than have a mob outside your home when you refuse to promise them what they want”); dig up dirt on your opponents (“Remember how [another candidate] was expelled from the Senate after a careful examination by the censors?”); suck up to special interests; “stick to vague generalities,” etc.

Politics has been better before, and it has been worse. But politics, whatever one would wish, has never been a contest of ideas

This is not for one moment to excuse the Tories’ behaviour. Let me say that again: this is not to excuse the Tories. But there are no virgins in this whorehouse. To read some of the commentary of late, you would think that lies and personal attacks began with the election of the Conservatives — as if the Liberals had never run attack ads (“soldiers, in our streets”), or as if the NDP had never lied (as, for example, about their cap and trade policy). What is truer to say, these days at least, is that the Conservatives are better at it: more disciplined, more relentless, less daunted by shame.

Politics has been better before, and it has been worse. But politics, whatever one would wish, has never been a contest of ideas. Occasionally it is about ideas, as in the free trade election of 1988. But such debates as do arise are resolved not by persuasion but by combat. There simply isn’t time, people in politics tell themselves — the public hasn’t the patience. You can’t explain your position, and you can’t defend yourself against the other side’s attacks. All you can do is attack. Elections, in consequence, are about who can tear the most flesh off the other. And they all do it.

Bad behaviour in politics is so commonplace, so constant and so universal, that we do not even notice it. We’re often told that we’re too hard on people in politics, that we hold them to an impossibly high standard. But the truth is we hardly hold them to any standards at all: certainly none that we expect of each other. We want to believe, as my colleagues are moved to write from time to time, that “there are good people in politics.” And I suppose there are, in the sense that they are people with good intentions, who want to make life better for their fellow citizens. But they are also the people who stand and applaud at every Question Period inanity, who obediently read out the talking points they have been handed, who sign off on the attack ads and “defining” their opponent and the rest. Indeed, it is precisely because they are such good people, full of such good intentions, that they are able to rationalize it. People do the worst things for the best reasons.

You can’t separate politics from the people in it, as if they were somehow its victims and not its enablers

It could not be otherwise. Anyone with a distaste for politics as I’ve described it is unlikely to run; if they do, they are unlikely to win; and if they succeed, it is usually because politics changes them. Yes, it’s an adversarial system, like the law. But law is a profession; politics is a pathology. Twenty-four-hours-a-day, total immersion in partisan propaganda — my side good, their side bad, all the time, without exception — would drive anyone a little mad.

People often ask: how can we reform politics? And the answer is: we can’t. There are very few institutional changes that would do any good, and whatever would has no chance of being enacted. We’re not going to change politics until we change the culture. And we’re not going to change the culture. Only people in politics can do that.

There’s no getting around this. You can’t separate politics from the people in it, as if they were somehow its victims and not its enablers. It’s not going to change until somebody in politics — the followers, not the leaders, the ones who quietly tell reporters of their frustrations, but go along in the end — stands up and says it’s wrong of my party to behave this way. My party: never mind what the other guys are doing. We just need to stop. Us.

There may be good people in politics. But the problem in politics isn’t the bad guys. It’s the good guys.